Chapter 55 The Wardholder
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The Wardholder
Over the next handful of days, Saffron asked questions around Flarence about a potential wardholder.
Is there anyone inexplicably wealthy, despite appearing powerless?
Anyone reclusive, strange, whose story doesn’t quite add up?
Any families who have been here for many, many generations?
But the locals in Flarence were a stubborn, loyal bunch, and very few offered answers, even when Harrow tried to assimilate with his creamy, natural Bellandrian.
The population saw right through his fine clothing and his marbled royal accent, his chattering teeth as the icy chill deepened.
So Saff met only terse head shakes, suspicious shrugs, and, on one occasion, the intervention of the local Vergard, who insisted they move along from the congregation outside the Augur temple.
By the fourth day, Saffron was ready to scream into her knuckles.
The crew sat around a scuffed wooden table in a small tavern called the Skarver Vau—Crooked Dagger—whose barkeep offered Saffron a bemused, almost distrustful expression when she requested hot cocoa.
The Nyr?thi culture of pain over pleasure had bled across the border—as evidenced by the lack of local pleasurehouses, which Harrow was chagrined by—and most citizens seemed to find her blatant indulgence an affront.
Instead, she cradled a glass of warm honeywine, the smell of which reminded her of home.
She’d never particularly liked the stuff, preferring the efficient burn of flamebrandy, but it seemed preferable to the goblets of dark, frothy bitterale Miret and Relar nursed.
The boy was green in the face over the dry, sour taste.
Saffron surveyed the tavern, decorated with fish-scale wallpaper, rusted anchors, and wooden boat rudders.
Her radar for trouble was a finely tuned instrument, and it snagged on a straw-haired, middle-aged woman sitting alone at the bar.
The black-cloaked mage shot their party furtive glances, and while it might have just been the sound of their crude Vallish she abhorred, Saffron kept an eye on her.
“How do we know the wardholders even live in Flarence?” Saffron sat next to Levan, trying not to think about how close their thighs were. She spoke loudly, slowly, intentionally, surveying the room for reactions. “They could be anywhere.”
Levan took a sip of unspiked ambertea. “Wards have to be recast regularly, or their strength fades. And they cannot be recast at a distance.”
“They could return to Flarence via portari gate whenever they needed to replenish.” Saffron injected her voice with volume, enunciating every word precisely enough that a Bellandrian with a passing grasp on Vallish might understand. “How often is regularly?”
Miret scratched at his beard, and when he spoke, his teeth were brown-black from the grotesque ale. “The Great Wards around Atherin are cast once a month, but they have thousands of casters. For a place with a handful of mages…every week? Every fortnight?”
“So we stake out the cave,” suggested Levan. “Watch for a mage—or group of mages—arriving to recast the wards, take them out before they can do so.”
At this, the straw-haired woman at the bar drained her glass, slammed it back on the counter, then slid from her stool with an inebriated stumble. She scurried to the door and fled into the frozen night, leaving behind a thick outer robe lined with pale gray fur in her haste.
“We might not have to wait that long,” Saffron muttered, abandoning her revolting honeywine and making for the door. Levan followed without a word.
Dusk was settling over Flarence, a white salting of stars dusted across the indigo north.
The tavern was on a side street a few hundred yards from the village square, cobbles piled with banks of fresh snow—which made it easy enough to follow the scarpering mage’s trail.
They pursued her onto the next street—a residential area, lined with neat wooden houses of peach and lemon and dusty rose pink.
Saffron and Levan walked quickly and quietly until the woman’s black-shrouded back was a mere fifty yards away, the silhouette of a wand clenched in a fist. Her breath plumed in panicked puffs, though she did not peer over her shoulder, as though to see them coming would be to make it real.
Guilt clenched Saffron’s belly as she withdrew her wand. “Sen effigias.”
The curse buried itself in the black-cloaked mage’s shoulder blade.
All at once, she turned to stone.
“Can you lift her?” Saffron muttered as they closed the gap. “Carry her somewhere more discreet.”
Levan grabbed the statue by the waist and hoisted it over his shoulder.
It must have been extraordinarily heavy, but he didn’t emit the slightest grunt of exertion as they slipped into a narrow alley between houses.
He set the Mage Practer on her feet then went to her back, pulling a dagger from his pocket and holding it to her throat from behind.
Saffron, facing the woman with her wand raised, said, “Ans disseffigias.”
Unlike a spell that held a victim in an enchanted state, such as sen debilitan, effigias worked almost as a transmutation between human and stone, their masses perfectly equal (providing the caster was skilled enough).
Just like coffee would stay hot chocolate once transmuted, effigias could be held forever without draining the caster’s well or requiring medei perpetua.
It had to be actively reversed lest the recipient stay stone in perpetuity.
These quirks were why the Silvercloaks preferred the stone curse to debilitan, because it was much easier to take down several perpetrators at once, only reversing the spells once they were safely in custody.
As soon as the statue became human, Saffron fired a second curse.
“Sen exarman.”
The aspen wand leapt from the mage’s clenched palm into Saffron’s. A precaution.
“You hold the ward over the cave?” Saffron asked in Vallish. The other mage was obviously proficient, if she’d heard enough in the tavern to be spooked.
The woman’s slanted gray eyes—half-Nyr?thi, if Saffron had to hazard a guess—narrowed, her thin jaw set. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her uncertain Vallish was pitted with fear.
“Our conversation in the Skarver Vau troubled you.”
The woman squirmed beneath Levan’s blade, but said nothing.
Saffron raised an eyebrow at Levan. “Can you compel her into talking?”
Chewing the inside of his cheek, Levan gave a short nod. He did not speak aloud, keeping the commands internal, but when the woman failed to crack, an expression of deep frustration broke over his face.
Saffron gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said softly, like the black-cloaked mage was a patient whose bone she was about to reset. “But I will, unless you talk.”
The woman spat a thick globule of saliva onto the snow-covered cobbles.
Saffron knew she was about to do something heinous.
Everything she had been through had prepared her for this—slaying the croupier Neatras on the night she was branded, carving out the eyeball of Kasan Melian on the dock, killing Vogolan in a moment of self-preservation, slaying the Whitewing in the pleasurehouse—and yet the prospect still sickened her.
Though that could be the honeywine, which sat in her stomach like oily syrup, threatening to regurgitate.
She clung to the gossamer logic that had gotten her this far: that it would all be unmade eventually.
This woman would experience immense pain now, and it would, as Levan pointed out, still be real—just like his own torture could never truly disappear from the world.
But after Saffron retrieved the Fifth Prophecy, after she found a weaverwick wand and wound back the decades, the black-cloaked mage would not know what terrible ills had befallen her in another life.
Not true absolution or redemption, but it was all Saffron had.
“Hold her arm up,” Saffron muttered.
Levan obliged, gripping the woman’s forearm with his golden palm. As he realized what Saffron was about to do, she saw the emotional shield thrown up behind his eyes.
Saffron pressed her wand tip to the stranger’s wrist. “Sen perruntas.”
A pale, bony hand fell to the snow, and the woman’s wail cut through the twilight like a scythe.
“Reattach it for me?” Saffron asked Levan lowly, knowing she was asking him to do something terrible, something he had not been able to do for himself, but he was a far more gifted Healer than she, and they needed the woman to know that unless she cooperated, the suffering would go on forever.
Swallowing hard, Levan pressed his own wand to the stump of the mage’s wrist. “Ans annetan.”
The hand leapt from the snow and clamped onto the stump, skin and flesh and bone sewn back together. Tears of agony poured down the mage’s cheeks, her whole body trembling in Levan’s grasp.
“It won’t end,” Saffron said. “We can do it all night—in all the time I’ve known him, his well has never run dry of power. Or you can answer our questions, and keep your hands.”
The woman muttered something in rapid-fire Bellandrian, but it was a strange, twisted accent, braided with Nyr?thi influence.
“ ‘You’ll kill me as soon as I answer your questions,’ ” Levan translated.
Saffron shook her head. “All we want is to breach those wards. If you allow us to do that, you’ll live.”
The woman shook her head once more, but Saffron sensed the weakening of her will—an instinct she’d honed over years of practice police interrogations. “Are you currently holding a ward over a cave mouth in the Cinereal Sea?”
After several shaky, whimpering moments, the woman looked down at her now immaculate wrist and nodded. Straw-colored hair fell into her tear-streaked face.
“Why? The person who concealed something in that cave died a thousand years ago. Why continue to hold the ward?”
The woman answered in that alloyed accent, and Levan translated.
“ ‘It’s the pride of my family. Enchanters since the dawn of time, powerful enough to hold a ward to prevent the world’s end.’ ”